Erhard Quotes

There are only two things in the world: nothing and semantics.

Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit.

The essence of communication is intention.

You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from.

At all times and under all circumstances, we have the power to transform the quality of our lives.

Even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it.

Ride the horse in the direction it's going.

The quickest way to be happy is to choose what you already have.

hI was following through on the mountain commitment from my younger days, and it's always a nice surprise when the newly minted adult doesn't disown the child he once was.

All my life, I have never felt as happy on Earth as when I'm getting closer to the sky.

It may be necessary to make compromises in everyday politics, but we cannot compromise with our conscience.

Live as if your life depends upon it.

You can live your life out of circumstance or you can live your life out of a vision. WERNER ERHARD

I assure you it's harder to battle human stupidity than to do battle with mountains. Mountains, after all, have holds.

There is nothing to complain about if someone is screaming outside. It is getting much worse if they are screaming all around, from every direction, in the dark.

Keeping in mind the old mountain adage that the longer you take to set up your bivy site, the shorter the bivy you have to endure, we ended up taking two hours to dig the snow cave.

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

An der Zimmerdecke hing das lange Schwert eines Schwertfisches, und neuerdings stand sogar der lange Zahn eines Narwals neben dem Schreibtisch. Das ganze Haus sah aus wie ein kleines Naturkundemuseum. Für Gustav Grünspecht war das völlig normal, denn er war Wissenschaftler und Tierforscher. Sein Fachgebiet waren die Tiefseefische. Doch an diesem Morgen galt sein Interesse nicht den

The altimeter had been damaged along the way, but the few bottles that we brought along to wash down the ordinary expedition rations were fine. True, a bottle gives only a vague indication of altitude, but can you drink an altimeter?

In a civilization of wage slaves, where people seek to survive more than to live, mountaineering is an enigma.

Why would I like to do this? Will it serve any purpose? Will it make my life easier? Is it essential for life? Does it only imply fulfillment of rather superficial desires? Which feelings move me to achieve this? Can I see a part of life’s happiness in it? Will it only improve my image? Does it present an important need in my life? Is my vanity moving me to do this? Does my inner voice support it? What is my responsibility in this matter? Will I be able to achieve it in an easy and carefree way? Will it take me a lot of time and strength to achieve? Is the matter worth the effort?

Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A

It is hard not to admire the gutsiness of this little paper, which was often a lone voice—certainly one of the loudest—in defending German democracy. It invited the wrath and fury of Hitler. It provoked him. It taunted him. And although the editors were adherents of a political point of view—that of the anti-Hitler Social Democrats—they were also firm believers that the Weimar Republic’s democratic principles were worth fighting for. The editors of the Munich Post, Martin Gruber, Edmund Goldschagg, Erhard Auer, and Julius Zerfass, were certainly not the only journalists of the Weimar Republic who deserve to be singled out for their courage as Hitler plotted paths to power.

Euria was like most of the sprawling metropolises in Erhard: tall skyscrapers that didn’t so much kiss the sky as ram their fist through it, their shadows casting a perpetual false night across the ground where the unfortunate dwelled.

is the part of the epiphany that is most remarkable to us: its work is automatic. Tobias said, “It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before. The more the group succeeds, the more I succeed.” As transformational expert Werner Erhard told us, “Let it use you; don’t try to use it.

Calm your soul, Hadjar Darkhan,” Erhard’s eyes flashed. “A warrior shouldn’t flounder like a fish caught in a net. Your mind must be clear and cool. Your heart must be hot. Your body must be controlled, no matter what. Your hands must be strong. Your eyes must be sharp. You’re in this world right now. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an illusion or not. You’re a warrior facing an enemy — your own unwillingness to see the truth. Defeat that enemy. Win the battle. That is a warrior’s way. Everything else, everything that’s not your battles and your victories, is just dust clinging to you. Reject it.

He was absolutely alone in this clammy impenetrable darkness.

Then there was EST (Erhard Training Seminars), the international self-help events that first broke on to the scene in the 1970s and were still going in the mid-1980s when Cynthia hooked up with them.

Philip Amato, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Wesley Emerson, Werner Erhard, Fernando Flores, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Goldstein, Martin Heidegger, Joan Holmes, Randy MacNamara, Jim Selman, William Shakespeare, and Constantine Stanislavsky.

auf. Es war Zeit für seinen Bericht über die Olchi-Familie. Er hatte in den letzten Wochen eine Menge von ihr gehört. Professor Brausewein, ein bekannter Gammelsberger Forscher und Erfinder, hatte sogar im Fernsehen über sie berichtet. Daraufhin war Harry sofort mit seinem Cabrio auf die Schmuddelfinger Müllkippe gedüst und hatte die Olchis besucht. Harry kaute seine Schokolade und dachte scharf nach. Als Erstes brauchte er eine gute Überschrift für seinen Bericht. Die Grünlinge von der Müllkippe, schrieb er. Aber das löschte er gleich wieder, denn es schien ihm nicht spannend genug.

ärgerlich. Er war Reporter beim Gammelsberger Tagblatt und lebte von aufregenden Neuigkeiten. Harry saß jetzt auf dem Balkon seiner kleinen Wohnung und verdrückte eine große Portion Fleischsalat. Als er damit fertig war, schob er sich noch zwei Schokoriegel in den Mund, diesmal Nuss-Nugat. Heute Nachmittag musste er unbedingt einen Artikel bei der Zeitung abliefern und war wie immer ziemlich spät dran. Das machte Harry nervös. Er nahm einen dritten Nuss-Nugat-Riegel aus der Packung und klappte seinen Laptop auf. Es war Zeit für seinen Bericht über die Olchi-Familie. Er hatte in den letzten Wochen eine Menge von ihr gehört. Professor Brausewein, ein bekannter Gammelsberger Forscher und Erfinder, hatte sogar im Fernsehen über sie berichtet. Daraufhin war Harry sofort mit seinem Cabrio auf die Schmuddelfinger Müllkippe gedüst und hatte die Olchis besucht. Harry kaute seine Schokolade und dachte scharf nach. Als Erstes brauchte er eine gute Überschrift für seinen Bericht. Die Grünlinge von der Müllkippe, schrieb er. Aber das löschte er gleich wieder, denn es schien ihm nicht spannend genug. Die Monsterfamilie von Schmuddelfing, das war schon eine bessere Schlagzeile. Harry tippte weiter: Eine Großfamilie mit drei Kindern haust in einer Höhle auf der Müllkippe von Schmuddelfing. Sie nennen sich DIE OLCHIS und ihre grüne Haut fühlt sich an wie Tintenfisch. Unser Reporter Harry Hahn hat sie getroffen. Sind es Monster aus dem All? Kommen sie aus der Tiefe des Meeres? An so etwas könnte man durchaus denken.

Mit dem vielen Nachdenken versaut man sich die ganzen schönen Fehler, die man noch hätte machen können...

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Possessions are worthless”, he wrote, “The only thing that endures and cannot be taken away from you is knowledge.

Only what you have learned, has any worth!

steel

What we are engaged in creating is the opportunity for people to participate in the transformation of people’s lives and of life itself. This context of transformation is a context of freedom and opportunity, of empowerment and human joy, of contribution and of participation. Participation in this transformation is, for me, the fullest expression of being. ~ Werner Erhard

Unfrei ist der Mensch, der nicken muss, obwohl er innerlich den Kopf schüttelt.